Margaret Bourke-White: Pioneering Photojournalist

Via Photograph Magazine

Margaret Bourke-White: Pioneering Photojournalist

Monroe Gallery of Photography, Santa Fe

Margaret Bourke-White, Buchenwald Prisoners, 1945. Courtesy Monroe Gallery of Photography ©Time In.

Referring to the French Impressionist painter Claude Monet, fellow painter Paul Cézanne famously quipped to art dealer Ambroise Vollard: “Monet is only an eye, but my God what an eye!” The same could be said for American photographer Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971). Examining Bourke-White’s work, from the late 1920s through the 1950s, one quickly senses her complete command of the photographic tools at her disposal that resulted in compositions filled with formal elements of design that were part and parcel of narratives that documented times of significant events. Soaring heights of urban construction, extreme poverty in the South, and World War II are only a few of the historic moments captured in photographs by Bourke-White – many of which are iconic in American photography.

In 50 photographs on view at Monroe Gallery of Photography through June 28, Margaret Bourke-White: Pioneering Photojournalist gives a brief, yet fine overview of her prolific career.

 

Margaret Bourke-White, Fort Peck Dam, Fort Peck, MT, 1936. Courtesy Monroe Gallery of Photography  ©Time Inc

 

Included are instantly recognizable images such as At the Time of the Louisville Flood, Louisville, Kentucky, 1937, where people are queued in a bread line below a billboard exuding the good life, as well as Buchenwald Prisoners, Germany, 1945, in which prisoners confined behind barbed-wire await liberation -- the latter taken when Bourke-White was on assignment for Life Magazine traveling with Patton’s army. In one of her most artistic images, Patterns Made by Steel Liners for Diversion Tunnels, Fort Peck Dam, Montana, 1936, geometric patterns fill the frame composed of various machine-hewed disks with radiating spokes. Bourke-White, whose career was cut short by Parkinson’s disease in 1956, once said, “To understand another human being you must gain insight into the conditions which made him what he is.” She was tenacious in her pursuit of photographs that conveyed truths about the human condition, as well as the beauty in things produced by humankind. 

 

 

— By Douglas Fairfield  05/04/2015

Trailblazer: Monroe Gallery tips artistic hat to Margaret Bourke-White

©Time Inc. Courtesy Monroe Gallery

Via The Santa Fe Reporter

April 22, 2015

By Enrique Limón

As a symbol for globetrotting photojournalism, Margaret Bourke-White’s brand in the field is still felt today. Born on June 14, 1904, in New York City, she soon would become a beacon for editorial photography, focusing on subjects both live and inanimate, and securing the first cover image for LIFE magazine—an iconic study of the dams in the Columbia River basin.


“There is so much to talk about Margaret Bourke-White,” Monroe Gallery of Photography’s Michelle Monroe muses. “Her vision directed LIFE. It was her global look at why things mattered; why the Russian Revolution was going to affect ours; why man’s industry and this sort of race toward that conclusion mattered; why humans in India who were trying to gain independence from Britain mattered to America. It was a really sophisticated worldview for that time.”

Monroe continues, “America was largely illiterate in 1936, and this woman met [LIFE editor] Henry Luce and was the first person hired for his magazine, which is also extraordinary—because she’s a girl,” she says, with a playfully scandalized tone.
The Don Gaspar gallery showcases 54 of Bourke-White’s emblematic images, starting this Friday and going through June 28.

Before her death of Parkinson’s disease in 1971, Bourke-White managed to stamp her unique perspective on historic events like Gandhi’s release from prison in 1946, the ripple of the South African labor exploitation during the 1950s and the liberation of German concentration camps by General Patton.

The breadth of Bourke-White’s oeuvre as well as her approach, Monroe stresses, far surpasses whatever labels one might want to stick on her based on gender.

“I try not to talk about ‘female artists’ or ‘female gallerists’ because that puts us in a kind of margin,” Monroe says. “You have to think that in 1936, it was extraordinary that this woman was hired as the first journalist in what would become Henry Luce’s magnum opus.”

Margaret Bourke-White
5-7 pm Friday, April 24
Monroe Gallery of Photography
112 Don Gaspar Ave., 

505 992 0800

67 Years after Liberation, Bourke-White Print of Buchenwald Sells for Over $115,000

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"Sotheby's Photographs sale brought $3.8 million and achieved strong prices
for the masters of 20th-century photography, including Ansel Adams,
Margaret Bourke-White, Edward Steichen and Robert Mapplethorpe."

Sotheby's Photographs Sale
April 3, 2012
LOT 74: MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE, 1904-1971


THE LIVING DEAD AT BUCHENWALD
large-format, ferrotyped, mounted, annotations in ink on the reverse, framed, 1945 (Portrait
of  Myself, pp. 268-9; Callahan, pp. 152-153; Goldberg, pl. 45; Retrospective, p. 93; Best of
Life, p. 20)
15 5/8 by 19 3/8 in. (39.7 by 49.3 cm.)

ESTIMATE 30,000-50,000 USD
Sold: 116,500 USD

Related: April in History: The Liberation of Buchenwald
             
              Modern print information available here